I have had an adversarial relationship with writing for almost my entire life. Writing is stressful, it’s slow. At best it’s annoying; at worst, it’s agony. You’d think I’d just avoid doing it, which is what I do most of the time. But I keep getting pulled back to it, because sometimes I have things I want to say. Even then, it’s painful getting the words out.
I think I may have approached it wrong from the beginning. When I studied English in elementary school, I approached grammar and spelling in pretty much the same way I approached math. There was a right answer, and there were wrong answers. Sentences had a logic much like equations– they could even be diagrammed. It was a matter of knowing the rules and applying them correctly, and that was how my Aspie brain operated.
But then we began studying something called the “writing process,” which was to be used for writing essays. You began with an outline, then wrote a rough draft, which you would check for errors and rewrite– maybe even twice. My English book gave an example of a paper at each stage, showing a rough draft full of proofreading marks scrawled in red ink to mark the mistakes.
This totally confused me! The rough draft was full of obvious mistakes, where the writer had ignored the rules taught earlier in the same textbook, that we’d just spent months learning. For instance, one of the sentences began with a lowercase letter, and another used the word “their” when it should have used “there.” Why didn’t they just write it correctly the first time?
But our teacher wanted us to write a rough draft and then proofread it. I ended up having to purposely make mistakes in order to have something to correct! I didn’t like doing it, and it confused me, because it seemed like an unnecessary extra step.
This didn’t cause me any problems until several years later, in high school, when writing assignments became more demanding. I think I had always tried to have the ideas I wanted to write planned out in my mind completely before I began writing. That usually worked if I only needed to write one or two paragraphs, but many the papers I had to write in high school were several pages long. I found myself stretched closer and closer to my limits, staring at a blank screen for hours until the words finally came pouring out, usually after midnight on the night before the paper was due.
I tried to adjust and make use of outlines to give me something to start with, but without knowing where I was going, I would begin a sentence only to erase it over and over as I realized it didn’t quite say what I wanted it to. Even when the paper was finished, I usually felt very negative about what I had written. I wanted it out of my sight, because reading it would only make me think of how it fell short of what I meant to say– like it was forced out of me.
I wondered if this was because I had never properly learned to write a rough draft full of mistakes to fix later. I wouldn’t allow myself to make mistakes because I hated seeing them on the page. My stressed writing process fed on itself, as guilt over not starting earlier served as added incentive to avoid writing until the deadline forced the issue. No way was I going to subject myself to that agony for longer than I needed to by writing the whole paper more than once!
Unexpectedly, though, I usually got good grades on those papers that I had felt so negatively about. My teachers in high school and in college commented that my writing style was friendly and clear, even when I was writing about complex topics, and they encouraged me to keep writing. One of my professors at Cedarville who knew that I was struggling with determining God’s will for my life wrote a very kind comment on one of my papers saying that he thought surely God must have something in mind to do with my writing ability because of how well I expressed myself.
I’m really not trying to brag when I say this– as a matter of fact, in some ways that was the last thing I wanted to hear! I ended up not pursuing a graduate degree in either of my majors– Bible or physics– because I knew that both would be very writing-centered, and I felt totally burned out with writing by the time I finished at Cedarville.
But there still is a part of me that *wants* to write, that seeks to connect with others by sharing the things I care about and that I’m interested in. It was really a struggle to write my previous post here, but a couple of things allowed me to get through it.
The first thing was structure. I came up with the idea of using parallel structure to try to answer the same list of questions for each 5-year period of my life. I wrote as many sentence prompts as I could think of:
— I cared about…
— I was obsessed with…
— What mattered to me was…
— I wanted…
— I worried…
— I feared…
— I missed…
— I regretted…
— People told me that…
— I thought that…
— I learned…
— I didn’t understand…
— The biggest change was…
— I thought that God was…
Then I pared down the list, trying to get rid of ideas that were redundant or that I couldn’t think of interesting answers for. As I began to write the first few sections of the post, I sometimes went back and added or removed prompts or changed their order. In the end, I went with seven sentence prompts, and the result was sort of a weird free-verse poem.
Without that sort of structure, I don’t think I would have been able to decide what to focus on. It’s why a lot of my posts here use a list format.
The second thing that allowed me to get anything written was Megan’s input and encouragement. I got stuck a lot of times, and I could feel that suffocating feeling of not being able to write another word without it all sounding wrong. But when that happened, I would send my incomplete draft to Megan, and she always had something positive and insightful to say about it.
For Megan, writing is not a dread– in fact, she often uses writing to calm down and relax. Take a look at how she describes her writing process:
“It’s like sensing an approaching wind. You feel it, ready your wings, and catch the current. And so you sail, watching the world pass below like a wandering stream. It’s from this vantage that my soul observes, experiences, and seeks to put to expression.”
Whoa– I can’t imagine that! It sure sounds nice. I’ve been getting hints lately that maybe I should try writing more again. I was just going through my old school papers, and I read some of those encouraging notes written by my teachers in high school and college. And I can’t help but see a world full of people around me who are struggling with all sorts of things– things that I surely can’t solve. But God can, and maybe reading about someone else who is depending on God will be an encouragement to them.
Anyway, one of the things I put on my birthday list was a small book of writing prompts, and Megan got it for me. Let’s see if it helps.
Land of My Sojourn 